A Secret Gift (5 page)

The letters helped me understand what our neighbors had endured and how the legacy of their suffering shaped the character of my community and my family—why it was that grace was said before meals, why the chance to work overtime was seen as a blessing, why sacrifice was the only thing to be taken for granted. I read the letters as the backstory to my own life and that of my hometown, not yet seeing in them the backstory of a nation.

And even if the B. Virdot letters were worthy of being shared with those beyond Canton, I felt chastened by the secrecy that sealed them and my grandfather’s role. Promises had been made. How could I, even after so many decades, dishonor him and them by making it all public? The right of privacy may have ended with the writers’ deaths, but should not their pride and dignity outlive them?

Late in the summer of 2008 I put the suitcase away and forgot about it. In the ensuing months, America’s economy cratered. My family too was touched. My sister lost her job. My mother’s travel business collapsed. The house across the street was foreclosed and vacant. And once again, neighbors began to reference the Great Depression. By late 2008, Americans began to provision themselves financially and emotionally against something they had only heard about—“the Hard Times.”

Then, one night at three in the morning in mid-November 2008, I sat up in bed and recognized the letters for what they were—not a dusty archive but a time capsule addressed to the present, one that had taken on a sense of urgency. And so I got out of bed and wrote about B. Virdot’s gift. The next morning I hesitantly e-mailed the story to the
New York Times,
fearing they would dismiss it as too parochial or personal. The response from the editor was immediate: “Remarkable. How do we know it’s true?” I offered proof—photocopies of the letters. The piece ran on the op-ed page three days before Christmas, on December 22, 2008—seventy-five years to the day when the B. Virdot checks arrived in Canton’s neediest homes. Within twenty-four hours it was the second-most e-mailed story in the
New York Times
and drew e-mails from as far away as England, China, Italy, Japan, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Brazil. Only then did I begin to grasp the power of B. Virdot’s gift.

In America, President George W. Bush and then Barack Obama would pour hundreds of billions of dollars into the wilting economy, prop up megacorporations, and invoke lofty Rooseveltian rhetoric. But it was the smallness of B. Virdot’s gift—a mere five dollars—that was its magic, not an act of governmental grandiosity but a gesture of human compassion. In a country reeling from the likes of Bernie Madoff, the avarice of hedge fund managers, and the potentates of failed financial institutions, the story of B. Virdot’s gift came as welcome relief.

It stood as a rebuke to those whose creed had been “More is better.” Against the billions being doled out, the B. Virdot dollars were dwarfed, and would have been lost in the first rounding off of even the most modest relief effort. It was precisely that, its puniness and its purity, which gave it its transformative power, then and now. It was too small to put even a dent in the Great Depression but just enough to fend off the sense that no one cared and nothing could be done. For one moment, in one forgotten town, one man managed to shrink the vastness of the Depression to a human scale.

Reading the letters to B. Virdot also reminded me that community is more than collective self-interest. The Depression was a calamity that brought incalculable suffering to the greedy and the innocent alike. There is no romanticizing the wreckage it wrought. But it also rid us of our sense of entitlement and made us take inventory of our intangible wealth. The Depression was like a great anvil upon which our national character was beaten into shape. It forged an indomitable spirit we later recognized as “the Greatest Generation.”

Still, I was unsure if writing for the
Times
had been the right thing to do. I worried that my grandmother would not have approved. The day the
Times
story ran I returned home and found phone messages from readers. But first I had to wade through old messages that had to be saved or erased. One of these was from my grandmother. She had passed away three years earlier, but I had not been able to bring myself to erase her voice. Now, on this day, she spoke to me again—this time, from the grave:

“Dearest Wonderful Ted . . . I am so proud of you. . . . Thank you for your wonderful love of me and your devotion. God Bless you. . . . I love you, darling . . . Minna.” Once more I saved the message. I could not help but feel she had given me her blessing to continue. And so I did.

Over the ensuing year I combed through thousands of pages of documents in an effort to track down the descendants of those who had written to B. Virdot. I wanted to know what had become of them. Did they survive? Did they go on to prosper? Did they become part of some permanent underclass? Did they know about the B. Virdot gift, and if so, did it make a difference in their lives?

I began my research by reading all the letters, then focused on about fifty that seemed representative of the rest. Over time, I developed a methodology that served me well in locating the descendants of those who wrote to B. Virdot. I began with the Canton city directory from 1933 that alphabetically listed the residents, their trade, employer, spouse, and sometimes their children. From there I searched by name in the U.S. Censuses for 1910, 1920, and 1930. This provided me such vital information as age, family members, place of birth, national origin, date of naturalization, native language, and level of literacy. It also gave me a snapshot of the immediate community, listing the same information about their neighbors. I combed through World War I draft registration forms and land records. In Canton’s probate court, I searched wills, death records, and marriage licenses. The latter allowed me to trace the lives of daughters who later took their husbands’ last names.

Death records provided me not only the cause of death and place of burial but the names of the attending physician and the parents of the letter writers. Parents’ names allowed me to track family histories going back in time. Taking the date of death from the death certificate, I could find the person’s obituary in the newspaper, and that gave me a condensed life story of the deceased, and, even more important, the names of surviving family members, which allowed me to come forward in time to the present. I also pored over ships’ passenger lists and naturalization records and microfilmed copies of the
Canton Repository
. I was given access to the county’s orphanage records and the state’s prison records.

There my work ended—with regard to documents—and began with regard to people. Using various online search sites and telephone directories I tracked down the survivors. Over the course of the next sixteen months, I interviewed about five hundred descendants, many of them multiple times. To my surprise, seventy-five years after B. Virdot made his offer, nearly all the descendants still called Canton “home.” Many lived within five miles of where their parents or grandparents had written their letters during the Great Depression.

I read them the letters. Many wept. They provided me with personal stories and family albums, and helped me trace lives across the generations. They shared with me what wisdom, if any, had been handed down from that awful time. I walked the streets and alleyways of my hometown seeing them with new eyes, guided by the voices of the letters. My years as an investigative reporter prepared me well for such a quest.

But I was not prepared for what I was to learn about my grandfather, the man they knew as “B. Virdot.” The same suitcase that contained the letters held tantalizing leads to the identity of Sam Stone, a man whose background was as mysterious to his own family as it was to the recipients of his largesse. For his children and grandchildren, the revelations related to B. Virdot were just the beginning. The same repositories of public records that helped me track down the descendants of those who wrote to Mr. B. Virdot also yielded clues about my grandfather’s past. It took months to clear away decades of fabrication and deception—even today, given my feelings for the man, it is hard for me to utter the word
lies
—before I could begin to understand what drove him to make such a gift.

For a year I imagined myself on two parallel pursuits—the one to track down the identities of those who wrote to B. Virdot, the other to discover the true identity and motivation of my grandfather. But over time I came to see the two quests converge. The more I discovered of Sam’s secret past, the better I understood the struggles of those he helped. Conversely, the more I learned of those whom he had chosen to aid, the more insight I gained into Sam himself. Only when I could step back far enough was I able to see that the tiny pixels of these myriad individual lives all came together in the face of my grandfather, and that pieces of Sam’s own fragmented and secretive life were reflected in each of their stories.

II
.

It’s a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it’s a depression when you lose yours.

- HARRY S TRUMAN

S
am, the inveterate prankster, had a favorite trick, one that amused him well into his eighties. He would tape a thread to a dollar bill and leave it in the middle of the hallway outside his apartment, the other end of the thread extending under his door and resting in his hands. His eye would be fixed to the peephole until someone came upon the bill and stooped to pick it up. Then he would give the thread a swift jerk and snatch the bill away before the passerby could lay a finger on it. He could scarcely control his laughter.

In an envelope, I have one of those dollar bills, the long thread still taped to its underside. Like many of his tricks, this one was rooted in Sam’s own life. Time and again the prospects of good fortune and better times had been cruelly snatched away from him. But by 1927, he had finally established himself as a respected merchant. He was then thirty-nine. His Canton store, Stone’s Clothes, provided him and his new bride with a solid living. He had investments in real estate, and a lifestyle he could never before have imagined. Then came the crash of ’29 and it nearly wiped him out. He had allowed himself to become overextended in real estate, the clothing store that he had nurtured was failing, and, like so many businessmen of that period, he stood on the brink of bankruptcy. It was a severe setback, but he’d endured worse. Through it all he did what he could to insulate his wife from financial worries, holding to his routine and concealing whatever doubts he had. A few years later he would recognize that same trait in many of those who wrote to his alias, B. Virdot.

After the reversals of 1929, it took Sam three years to get back on his feet. He worked frightful hours, saved what he could, and turned customers’ sensitivities to price to his advantage with promotions such as “Buy a suit and get an extra pair of pants free.” His own rough edges, his lack of pretension, and his empathy for their struggles helped him win over the workingman and those just eking by. In him, they recognized one of their own. Like them, he was scrappy, determined to keep what was his, and to win back that which had been lost—even if it meant giving chase to a shoplifter and tackling him blocks away, as he was known to do.

By the fall of 1933 Sam had reestablished himself and his business. Like many businesses that survived those years, his store had become not merely a place to shop but a refuge where men fatigued by years of disappointment and rejection could engage in friendly banter and be valued for more than what was in their pockets. He had a gift for drawing laughter from the dourest of circumstances. It proved to be no small asset in those years.

By late 1933, he was in the enviable position of being able to take advantage of business opportunities others could not. Stores were closing all around him, and retail chains, desperate to raise cash, sought to unload their marginal operations at a fraction of their worth. On September 1, 1933, Sam purchased the Kibler Company and its nine menswear stores in Ohio, Illinois, and West Virginia. But even in the depths of debt, he had sworn that he would repay his creditors, and even those willing to have accepted fifty cents on the dollar were paid in full, though it took years.